I am a regular reader of Amit Agrawal's Digital Inspiron. Today he had published an article about how you can {ln:nw:http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/read-download-zinio-online-magazines-free-on-desktop/3410/ 'read popular magazines} online for free. Its a pretty simple hack but works great.
Here are the steps to access all the popular magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, Mens Health, Popular Mechanics or Reader's Digets Free Online.
- Download {ln:nw:http://www.apple.com/safari/download 'Safari Browser} on your computer and install it.
- Now open Safari Browser go to Edit-->Preferences-->Advance and check the box "Show Developer Menu in Main Menu".
- Now go to Developer-->User Agent and select Mobile Safari 1.1.2-iPhone.
Now enter the address www.zinio.com/iPhone into your safari browser and voila.. you have access to all the popular magazines.
This made me think about changing the FireFox user agent to iPhone. I downloaded {ln:nw:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59 'firefox user agent Changer} and changed the firefox user agent to iPhone. After doing so, when I visited Zinio.com/iphone, it didn't work. I even tried changing my headers with {ln:nw:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/967 'Modify Headers} extesion.
Amit if you read this article, Do you have any idea why it's not working with FireFox user-agent extension?
Updates
{ln:nw:http://www.ismashphone.com/2008/05/using-firefox-w.html 'iSmashphone} found out a way to override your firefox user agent to fake it as iPhone and now with this technique you can read playboy or penthouse or any magazine without installing Safari.
You can go to FireFox "about:config" and create new string "general.useragent.override" with the value Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States) and you should be able to read all the magazines free.